shame

I think there's something messed up in how we or society at large or something thinks of wrongdoing and forgiveness. Never sin, never do wrong. But also, it's going to happen. You're going to do wrong. So hopefully, most of the time, we own up to it, apologize, atone, and they forgive.

But that doesn't happen. If people don't forgive, then you cannot admit wrongdoing. If people keep hurting you, despite what they say, you can't forgive

Idk exactly what's what or if I'm pointing at the thing well enough, but there's some kind of double bind there

If you won't be forgiven, you can't feel shame

If you can't feel shame, you can't confront those times you've done wrong and feel how what you did was wrong

I feel like normally you still can feel shame even if you're not forgiven, which is why shame is 'high stakes', i.e shame comes from the risk of not being forgiven

i like that you're pointing to how there's something there about how wrongdoing and shame is bound together (edited)

or are you more pointing to the forgiveness bit?

My take on this is that it's actually not safe to feel shame, and especially to broadcast it, if in a social environment where paths to forgiveness aren't available

And actually, the paths to forgiveness have to be pretty flexible for it to be safe

(flexible as in many ways to forgiveness, or ease of forgiveness?)

There're a lot of environments where shame will be treated as evidence of wrongdoing

Not necessarily ease but you have to work with the person to work through their shame on mutually agreeable terms

Because e.g. people do stuff for reasons - so probably there's gonna be objections to the rule they broke

And that should be accounted for

There're a lot of environments where shame will be treated as evidence of wrongdoing

Shame is evidence of wrongdoing though, and that's ok? That should be ok? Showing shame and contrition when appropriately should be viewed positively, but instead people lean on getting mad because of the wrongdoing?

In an ideal world, when someone does something wrong, they show shame and contrition, things change to account for the wrongdoing if necessary (whether fixing things or preventing future wrongdoing or something else), people are forgiven if possible, things go back to a new normal

I guess also one should act in such a way that others would prefer to tell you if they did something wrong and apologize than to keep it secret from you

Hmm I dunno about that

Shame is probably always evidence of wrongdoing according to the person feeling the shame, but they might've picked up the idea that what they did was bad from all kinds of untrustworthy sources (e.g. early childhood lol)

Wrongdoing can also be bilateral, but if one person feels and owns up to shame, I think it requires a good amount of sophistication on the part of the people around to not default to blaming that person